Harriet Lau

About

Harriet Lau is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental & Planetary Sciences at Brown University. Her research group explores global-scale geodynamical problems across many time scales, including solid Earth and ocean tides (hours to years), deformation of the Earth due to the melting of large Pleistocene ice sheets (years to tens of thousands of years), and mantle convection, which drives plate tectonics (millions to billions of years). Her work aims to coherently characterize the Earth's behavior across these vastly different time scales and to learn fundamental insights about our planet. Harriet Lau has contributed to understanding Earth's internal processes, including recent research on Earth's core and mantle interactions, early tectonic activity, and the Earth's magnetic field. She has presented at TEDx New England on Earth's natural cycles and rhythms, and her work has been featured in various scientific discussions and publications. She received the Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering in 2022 in recognition of her outstanding work on the relationships between Earth's deformation and climate.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Geology
• Physics
• Meteorology
• Engineering
• Astronomy
• Geophysics
• Seismology
• Geography
• Telecommunications

Selected publications

• Geodynamic, geodetic, and seismic constraints favour deflated and dense-cored LLVPs

  Earth and Planetary Science Letters · 2022-12-22 · 56 citations

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• Inference of the Timescale‐Dependent Apparent Viscosity Structure in the Upper Mantle Beneath Greenland

  AGU Advances · 2023-02-24 · 28 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Contemporary crustal uplift and relative sea level (RSL) change in Greenland is caused by the response of the solid Earth to ongoing and historical ice mass change. Glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) models, which seek to match patterns of land surface displacement and RSL change, typically employ a linear Maxwell viscoelastic model for the Earth's mantle. In Greenland, however, upper mantle viscosities inferred from ice load changes and other geophysical phenomena occurring over a rang…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Transient rheology in sea level change: Implications for Meltwater Pulse 1A

  Earth and Planetary Science Letters · 2023-03-16 · 13 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Coupled fates of Earth’s mantle and core: Early sluggish-lid tectonics and a long-lived geodynamo

  Science Advances · 2024-08-02 · 11 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Conventional Earth evolution models are unable to simultaneously reproduce two fundamental observations: the mantle's secular temperature record and a long-lived geodynamo before inner core nucleation. Today, plate tectonics efficiently cools the mantle, but if assumed to operate throughout Earth's history, past mantle temperature and plate motion become unrealistically high. Through coupled core-mantle modeling that self-consistently predicts multiple mantle convection regimes, we show that ove…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Surface loading on a self-gravitating, linear viscoelastic Earth: moving beyond Maxwell

  Geophysical Journal International · 2024-04-09 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  SUMMARY Constitutive laws are a necessary ingredient in calculations of glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) or other surface loading problems (e.g. loading by ocean tides). An idealized constitutive law governed by the Maxwell viscoelastic model is widely used but increasing attention is being directed towards more intricate constitutive laws that, in particular, include transient rheology. In this context, transient rheology collectively refers to dissipative mechanisms activated in addition to…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Towards a new framework for interpreting mantle deformation: integrating theory, experiments, and observations spanning seismic to convective timescales

  NSF · $452k · 2022–2027

• Constraints from multiple low frequency data on the long wavelength density structure in the deep mantle

  NSF · $596k · 2019–2023

Frequent coauthors

• J. X. Mitrovica

  46 shared

• Jacqueline Austermann

  46 shared

• Konstantin Latychev

  38 shared

• B. K. Holtzman

  Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

  28 shared

• M. Al Asad

  University of California, Berkeley

  24 shared

• Barbara Romanowicz

  Planetary Science Institute

  20 shared

• David Al‐Attar

  University of Cambridge

  20 shared

• Paula Koelemeijer

  19 shared

Awards & honors

• Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering (2022)

Similar researchers at Brown University

• John Mustardh-126
• Yongsong Huangh-95
• Ralph Millikenh-92